Jazz Hands and Coke Sweat

An image of Haley MlotekAn image of Adam NaymanAn image of Elizabeth Berkely in Paul Verhoeven's ShowgirlsI am still not entirely on board with the reclamation of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, but I can’t pretend it isn’t meaningful to a lot of people.

Jeffrey McHale made a documentary about those people, and the movie they love, a couple of years ago; it’s called You Don’t Nomi. And when it hit VOD last summer, I recorded an episode of Someone Else’s Movie with two of McHale’s subjects, my friend Adam Nayman and fellow film critic Haley Mlotek, because when would I ever get another opportunity to have an unironic conversation about Verhoeven’s film?

Now, finally, I’m able to release the episode — there were some issues with the file that took far too long to resolve — and you can enjoy a solid hour of grown-up conversation about a movie that’s far too often boiled down to “All About Eve, but with cocaine”. And yeah, maybe it deserves to be … but what this episode posits is, what if it doesn’t?

Get on it! Subscribe on Apple PodcastsGoogle Play and Stitcher and get the episode immediately, or download it directly from the web.

And then you can switch to another meta-cinema conversation on today’s NOW What, as I talk to the perpetually fascinating documentary filmmaker Rodney Ascher about simulation theory, which forms the basis of his latest work A Glitch in the Matrix … and whether that’s something about which any of us needs to be worrying.

I mean, probably not. But it’s a fun conversation just the same.

Oh, also! In advance of the new buddy-cop series Pretty Hard Cases premiere on CBC tomorrow night, I did another one of NOW’s video panels, sitting down virtually with stars Meredith MacNeill and Adrienne C. Brown and creators Tassie Cameron and Sherry White to talk about the show and what it tries to do differently from similar procedurals.

It’s a good talk! Check it out here! No spoilers, obviously. I’m not a monster.

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